Dynamic and automated creative for ecommerce

Dynamic and automated creative means ads that are built from your product data using a template, rather than made one at a time. It suits stores with large catalogues that want their ads to stay on brand without hand-making each one. The design work is the template and its rules. We do not promise that any ad will sell more.

This page is part of ad creative.

Who it’s for, and when it isn’t

It suits stores with hundreds or thousands of products, where making an ad per product by hand is not realistic, and where campaigns already draw on a product feed.

It is not the right fit for a small catalogue, where hand-made ads are simpler and usually better. Look at static ad design instead. It is also a poor fit if your feed is incomplete or untidy. A template repeats every feed problem at scale, so fix the data first.

What’s included

• Ad templates designed for feed-driven formats, with the rules for how they fill
• Guardrails for long titles, missing images, odd image shapes and sale prices
• A reusable set of brand elements, such as logo placement, colours and frames
• Responsive asset sets, where a platform combines images and text for you
• Test ads checked against real products, including awkward ones
• A short guide to what the templates do and how to change them

We ask for your brand guidelines, logo files, product images to an agreed standard and access to your feed. You get back the template files, sample exported images and a short written guide.

How we do it

We start with the feed and the campaigns, so we know what data the ads can use and which formats they must fit. Then we design the template and the rules that sit behind it. A static ad only has to look right once. A template has to look right for every product, including the one with a very long name and no second image.

So we test on real products, not on neat samples. We change the rules until the awkward cases look acceptable, and we write down what the template does so you can change it later.

Platform options

Google and Meta both let you build ads from product data, and both change how this works and what it is called. We design to the options your campaigns actually use.

• Google. Your Merchant Center feed drives Shopping listings, and Performance Max and dynamic remarketing use it too, mixing your products with your other images and text.
• Meta. Advantage+ catalogue ads, once called dynamic product ads, show people items they looked at or similar ones, as single images, carousels or collections, with images and prices taken from your catalogue.
• Limits. Each has rules about image shapes, text length and which feed fields it reads, and they change, so we check them at the start of each project.

If you are not sure what your campaigns use, the first step is to find out, and we help with that.

How design and paid media work together

The feed is the media side’s raw material, and the template is the design side’s. Neither works alone. Google Shopping depends on feed quality: titles, images, identifiers and prices. If those are poor, no template will rescue the ads. We tell you when the feed is the problem, and Shopping management is where it gets fixed.

Display ads are where templated creative most often appears, because the same product can be shown in many sizes. There, the media plan decides which audiences see which products, and the template decides how each one looks. We plan them together so the sizes you design match the sizes the campaign uses.

For hand-made ads in the same account, see static ad design. Most stores end up with both.

We judge results against your own sales figures, not only what a platform reports.

What it costs

Dynamic creative is usually priced as a set of templates, with changes quoted separately. See the pricing page. Ad spend is paid to the platforms separately.

One-off creative is priced at an agreed hourly rate. If you have a digital marketing retainer with us, ad creative for the channels we run is often already covered by it. See the pricing page.

What we measure

We check that the templates behave: text fits, images are not cropped badly and prices match the store. After launch we look at which products and formats the platform shows, and compare the campaign reports with your store’s sales records. We say what we think it means and what we cannot tell. We do not promise results.

Not sure where to start?

A creative review will show whether your current ads suit templates, or whether a smaller, hand-made set would serve you better.